William Messing (Minnesota)

Recent Progress in the Theory of Displays (d'apres Lau)

Displays were introduced by Thomas Zink in 1997 and furnish an alternative Dieudonne Theory to both Crystalline Dieudonne Theory and Cartier's theory via Typical Curves. They are much more elementary objects living entirely in the realm of linear algebra. Using displays one can give a classification of p-divisible formal groups. There is a variant definition of a Dieudonne display which allows one to classify p-divisible groups over complete local rings provided the residue characteristic is > 2. I will introduce displays (and Dieudonne displays) and discuss recent progress in the theory.